Re: Squeak as HyperCard

[Jan Hlavacek <lahvak@math.ohio-state.edu>]

On Thu, Jul 15, 1999 at 02:09:46AM -0500, Ian Bicking wrote:
> I'm not entirely sure what the core developers of Squeak are trying 
> to do, but the more I think about it the more I'm pretty sure they are 
> trying to make something like HyperCard/HyperStudio, only a lot 
> better.
> 
> They've been working on Morphic quite a bit, which is a widget 
> system that is highly visual -- you drag the buttons around, inspect 
> them, etc., and there is no code generation but what you create 
> really *is* the interface, not a template for the interface.  Anyway, 
> it's very concrete, very dynamic, and has some spiffy features.  All 
> the multimedia features you'd expect and desire, like fancy text-
> shaping, polygons, image editting, etc.
> 
> Now, the system is a long ways from being ready to use with 
> actual children or the programming-illiterate.  I don't know when this 
> is going to change -- it has everything to make a pretty neat 
> program, but isn't packaged in a very sanitized way.  A lot of the 
> underlying Smalltalk comes through in unexpected places, which 
> probably isn't what you want to happen.

Another program going in this direction seems to be Boxer
<http://soe.berkeley.edu/boxer/>.  In fact, there is a long and
interesting discussion on the topic of Boxer and HyperCard in the boxer
mailing list archive.  Boxer doesn't seem to have such powerful
multimedia capabilities as squeak,  but it is much more "packaged and
sanitized".  Little bit of promotional blurb from the boxer web site:

   Boxer is the first example of a "computational medium" for real people
   -- not just for computer experts. We want to extend literacy from
   traditional static and linear textual forms, to a new, dynamic and
   interactive medium. Students, teachers and materials developers should
   all be able to create, combine and modify computational documents of
   unprecedented expressiveness, simplicity and flexibility. Learn it
   once; use it forever.

The underlying language of boxer is basically a logo dialect.  

The biggest problem with boxer is that it runs only on mac, and it is not
open source.  I sent an e-mail to the developers asking them about
possibility of a linux port and source release, but I never got any
reply.  It seems that a large part of boxer is written in lisp, so it
shouldn't be so hard to port (theoretically ;-).  I would love to see
boxer on a linux desktop.  I have a feeling that boxer could, after a
much of improvement, become even a highly programmable window manager for
linux, with boxer programs running other linux applications inside them.  
> 
> Outside of the core developers (who all work at Disney, and many 
> of whom have some background in education) there doesn't seem 
> to be much interest in this direction by the Squeak community.  
> Except sanitizing Squeak for distribution, which interests a lot of 
> people but not particularly the Disney people.  Funny that.
> 
> I thought I'd present it as a potential direction.
> 

I thing that squeak should be at least added to the list of existing
applications.

That brings me to another thing I wanted to suggest.  We already have
several languages that can be called "educational" on our list. There is
logo, scheme, isetl, we can add squeak.  Maybe we can create a separate
list with languages and programming environments that have something to
do with education and are available for linux.  Something where a
teacher who wants to teach a programming class could go and read about
the languages, download them and try them, and decide which one is the
best for their purpose.  

-- 
Jan Hlav\'{a}\v{c}ek
lahvak@math.ohio-state.edu  (Blind Carbon Copies will bounce)
www: http://www.math.ohio-state.edu/~lahvak/